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Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

Devian666 posted:

Between reading tomshardware and anandtech I'm satisfied that AMD have almost caught up to their main competitor the Phenom II X6 1100T.

Brutally true. Jeeesus. :suicide:

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Setzer Gabbiani
Oct 13, 2004

AMD has CPU's with proper SSE4 support now. That's something, right?

Canned Sunshine
Nov 20, 2005

CAUTION: POST QUALITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION



I almost feel like getting a FX-8150 solely to give AMD some pity cash.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

SourKraut posted:

I almost feel like getting a FX-8150 solely to give AMD some pity cash.
I stopped reading the Anandtech Bulldozer thread because posters were unironically telling people that it doesn't matter how much Bulldozer sucks, they still need to buy it so Intel would have competition. "You should willingly buy garbage so that the other guy won't get away with just making garbage!"

Maxwell Adams
Oct 21, 2000

T E E F S
So... Intel is dropping the price on i5's when bulldozer hits the market, right?

freeforumuser
Aug 11, 2007

Maxwell Adams posted:

So... Intel is dropping the price on i5's when bulldozer hits the market, right?

There will be price drops, but it won't be Intel.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

movax posted:

I wouldn't have an issue tossing a chip like this into a system for a non-gaming, non-techie family member if the price for the mobo and CPU was right.

I would, because it will suck down power and be hotter and noisier than just giving them an i3 or i5. Llano, on the other hand is a potentially good chip to recommend for a home PC, if half decent graphics are required.

However, I couldn't in all conscience recommend Bulldozer to anybody. I guess you can tell who's really loyal to AMD after this, if they end up with one of their high end chips and want to overclock it. That's just a punishing amount of power use and heat to get rid of, just to play catch up.

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Oct 12, 2011

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

Maxwell Adams posted:

So... Intel is dropping the price on i5's when bulldozer hits the market, right?
The i5 2500K is positioned against the FX-8120, which is 500Mhz slower than the FX-8150. In that matchup the 2500K is the clear winner, so Intel doesn't have much reason to lower prices. On the other hand, dropping the i7 2600K down to ~$250 or so (or even just replacing it with the i7 2700K) might happen.

Bonus Edit: VR-Zone has done a quick test of memory bandwidth scaling on Bulldozer, it seems that basic DDR3-1600 is required for optimal performance, but going beyond that or using lower latency modules provides minimal benefit. It would be interesting to see how data compression is affected, since that's very memory bandwidth sensitive.

Alereon fucked around with this message at 08:47 on Oct 12, 2011

Maxwell Adams
Oct 21, 2000

T E E F S

Alereon posted:

The i5 2500K is positioned against the FX-8120, which is 500Mhz slower than the FX-8150. In that matchup the 2500K is the clear winner, so Intel doesn't have much reason to lower prices. On the other hand, dropping the i7 2600K down to ~$250 or so (or even just replacing it with the i7 2700K) might happen.

Bonus Edit: VR-Zone has done a quick test of memory bandwidth scaling on Bulldozer, it seems that basic DDR3-1600 is required for optimal performance, but going beyond that or using lower latency modules provides minimal benefit. It would be interesting to see how data compression is affected, since that's very memory bandwidth sensitive.

In the Tech Report review, they gave Bulldozer 1866 memory while everything else got 1333. I guess that helped?

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

At first I saw this and was like "Oh cool!"



Then I saw this:



I hope everyone at AMD that worked on this project gets fired today.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
Looks like we'll be abandoning AMD for our compute clusters here if these numbers carry over to the kind of work we do, which it looks like it will.

This processor is a Shakespearean tragedy in every sense.

Mayne
Mar 22, 2008

To crooked eyes truth may wear a wry face.


What the gently caress AMD :ughh:

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast
Here's a wild card: Hardware Heaven's review
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/revie...revolution.html

Seems completely off to me, can anyone spot the problems with it? I'm more inclined to believe AnandTech, but it's interesting..

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Oct 12, 2011

movax
Aug 30, 2008

HalloKitty posted:

Here's a wild card: Hardware Heaven's review
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/revie...revolution.html

Seems completely off to me, can anyone spot the problems with it? I'm more inclined to believe AnandTech, but it's interesting..

Uggh that style sheet/site is hard to read, but gently caress even that little site has some awesome hardware to test with!

Only thing that really jumps out to me is that they used DDR3-1866, but they did use that on both platforms. No idea if they played with BIOS settings on the Intel board to increase memory frequency.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast
Even given a tie with the 2600k (mainly in gaming) in that review, which is by far the most positive review I've seen; it is still not amazing, given the power consumption.

AMD also shouldn't have tried marketing it as "8-core". I knew when I first read about Bulldozer modules that they might try that poo poo - and it wouldn't work. Well, they tried and it didn't.

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Oct 12, 2011

WhyteRyce
Dec 30, 2001

haha, apparently some poster on anandtech actually asked the AMD guy all the way back in January about potential OS issues with handling modules vs. cores

quote:

The OS doesn't know about modules, it only sees cores. But all cores are physical cores, so it won't matter.

quote:

So, here's the deal - we are obviously working with the OS and app vendors. My comment was pointed at the people who are obsessing about "how do I over-ride what you are doing because I think I am smarter and I know how to do it better."

Every environment is different, but there are people that believe they will get some massive boost by threading over modules vs. just loading threads in order. The reality is that the OS is going to figure out the best place to put the next thread. when you start up an app you may have all of the cores fire up, but once that happens, they all free up for different times. So people will never see that perfect world, and more importantly, the performance delta, for most apps, is not going to be radically different.


"Trust us we got this poo poo figured out"
...10 months...
"Here is an emergency kernel patch please use this"

Un-l337-Pork
Sep 9, 2001

Oooh yeah...


Yea, ouch. The Anandtech review just doesn't paint a pretty picture, unless you're encoding lots of video or running N-Queens benchmarks :(

Rawrbomb
Mar 11, 2011

rawrrrrr
Possible anandtech didnt have the krenel patch?

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

HalloKitty posted:

Here's a wild card: Hardware Heaven's review
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/revie...revolution.html

Seems completely off to me, can anyone spot the problems with it? I'm more inclined to believe AnandTech, but it's interesting..
It looks like a problem with their test selection. If I was in a charitable mood I'd say they didn't use a adequate variety of tests, if I wasn't I'd say they only published tests where Bulldozer did reasonably well.

Edit: As I look further this really does just seem like a marketing vehicle, given that they're reviewing the combination of the CPU, motherboard, and videocard.

Alereon fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Oct 12, 2011

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Alereon posted:

It looks like a problem with their test selection. If I was in a charitable mood I'd say they didn't use a adequate variety of tests, if I wasn't I'd say they only published tests where Bulldozer did reasonably well.

It's almost like the cherry-picked the games so it wouldn't look so bad. With the gratuitous amount of AMD logos on the page...

They still show it far behind the i7 on the other tasks like encoding/playback. They used the faster RAM but it's only a few % improvement according to some other sites. Plus they don't show the 2500k in the ratings which wouldn't help.

Any chance that it Bulldozer works a little better with AMD GPU's instead of NVIDIA?

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Bob Morales posted:

Any chance that it Bulldozer works a little better with AMD GPU's instead of NVIDIA?

Anand used a 5870.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

HalloKitty posted:

Anand used a 5870.

Hrm. Tom's used a Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 1.5 GB

Interestingly enough, Windows 8 shows measurable improvements over 7 in performance and power consumption

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8150-zambezi-bulldozer-990fx,3043-23.html

The F1 2011 numbers are hugely in Intels favor on Tom's site but on Hardware Heaven they have AMD edging Intel out :psyduck:

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

Bob Morales posted:

It's almost like the cherry-picked the games so it wouldn't look so bad. With the gratuitous amount of AMD logos on the page...

They still show it far behind the i7 on the other tasks like encoding/playback. They used the faster RAM but it's only a few % improvement according to some other sites. Plus they don't show the 2500k in the ratings which wouldn't help.
Yeah I read further and the conclusion and 9/10 rating offended me enough to call them out on their own forums for lack of editorial integrity and writing reviews to please their sponsors. My favorite part was when the reviewer said Bulldozer needed a lower price, and still gave it a 9/10 for value. My second-favorite part was where they didn't mention the higher power usage in the conclusion at all, or even on the page with the power usage numbers.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Alereon posted:

gave it a 9/10
Really hard to take that article seriously after reading that.

I'd honestly give it 5/10 if it weren't for beating Intel on the highly-threaded stuff that the X6 wasn't too bad at in the first place.

movax
Aug 30, 2008

Alereon posted:

Yeah I read further and the conclusion and 9/10 rating offended me enough to call them out on their own forums for lack of editorial integrity and writing reviews to please their sponsors. My favorite part was when the reviewer said Bulldozer needed a lower price, and still gave it a 9/10 for value. My second-favorite part was where they didn't mention the higher power usage in the conclusion at all, or even on the page with the power usage numbers.

Nice post, but sadly that HW site is just part of the "noise" that fosters up a really insular, groupthinking community and spreads FUD :( I hope someone answers that post politely!

e: hah, you already got called out within two posts.

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

I think the whole thing is pretty ridiculous but what kills it completely is the power draw, what the gently caress is up with such an absolutely massive difference in power draw under load compared to Intel?

If hardware sites wouldn't remind everyone about the Phenom II X6 these numbers would still look bad, there's no way to fix that, but with that on there as well (which is just due diligence, frankly), it really is a case of completely loving the dog. :bang:

Who thought up the modules=cores idea? Why? If it was an engineer I don't understand it, if it was a marketing guy fire the fucker now.

pienipple
Mar 20, 2009

That's wrong!
Seems like for every bench where BD performs adequately there's 2 or 3 where it's barely competing with a Phenom. :negative:

Even if it was roughly on par with Sandy Bridge I'd have a hard time picking BD due to that monster power consumption, as it stands right now it'd be no contest. That's not an easy thing to say either, as I'm a long time AMD fanboy. Haven't built an intel system since the Pentium II days.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

Agreed posted:

Who thought up the modules=cores idea? Why? If it was an engineer I don't understand it, if it was a marketing guy fire the fucker now.
I don't think the idea is necessarily flawed, just the implementation. It looks like the key mistake was to focus on high clock speeds at the expense of IPC, and then being unable to reach those targets due to process teething issues. Well, that and making the processor so big with so much cache that they didn't have the transistor budget to make it good. It really is a repeat of the Willamette Pentium 4 all over again (though that had the opposite cache problem, not remotely enough).

movax
Aug 30, 2008

Agreed posted:

Who thought up the modules=cores idea? Why? If it was an engineer I don't understand it, if it was a marketing guy fire the fucker now.

I think the concept has merit, I just hope that AMD gets the chance to further explore it. They burned a lot of transistors in their branch predictor for this one, hopefully a process shrink or further development (likely already been in progress, seeing as BD probably taped out six months ago).

Hopefully the Radeon 7000s own face (heh, we're already back at the 7000 numbering there) and can help keep AMD solvent.

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

The -idea- isn't stupid, it's actually pretty cool. 2 128bit or 1 256bit FP, that's neat. But advertising it is awful. At their best these will perform like modern 4-core processors. A module is not a core in the sense that people expect something WOWEE from an 8-core processor. Though it sure uses power like an 8-core...

movax posted:

Hopefully the Radeon 7000s own face (heh, we're already back at the 7000 numbering there) and can help keep AMD solvent.

They won every console in the next generation, so unless the processors literally kill them, the graphics cards should do well.

Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003

movax posted:

Hopefully the Radeon 7000s own face (heh, we're already back at the 7000 numbering there) and can help keep AMD solvent.
I'm expecting big things from Southern Islands.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

Agreed posted:

The -idea- isn't stupid, it's actually pretty cool. 2 128bit or 1 256bit FP, that's neat. But advertising it is awful. At their best these will perform like modern 4-core processors. A module is not a core in the sense that people expect something WOWEE from an 8-core processor. Though it sure uses power like an 8-core...
While that's true for floating point workloads, most people really care about integer performance. If Bulldozer actually performed like an 8-core for integer stuff but a quad-core for floating point, pretty much everyone would consider that a good deal. Except somehow they managed to get it to perform like a slower hex-core at best.

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

I'm expecting big things from Southern Islands.
My goal is to get a Radeon HD 7870 for the holidays, hopefully some of the initial cards that trickle onto the market before we get volume in Q1. If things go according to plan it will basically be a tweaked, higher-clocked Radeon HD 6970 with lower power usage and a lower price, which is all I could possibly ask for. At this point I'm concerned about how well the 7900-series will turn out given that it's completely unlike any GPU anyone's ever designed before, so drivers and its overall performance are an unknown quantity.

Alereon fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Oct 12, 2011

movax
Aug 30, 2008

Alereon posted:

While that's true for floating point workloads, most people really care about integer performance. If Bulldozer actually performed like an 8-core for integer stuff but a quad-core for floating point, pretty much everyone would consider that a good deal. Except somehow they managed to get it to perform like a slower hex-core at best.
My goal is to get a Radeon HD 7870 for the holidays, hopefully some of the initial cards that trickle onto the market before we get volume in Q1. If things go according to plan it will basically be a tweaked, higher-clocked Radeon HD 6970 with lower power usage and a lower price, which is all I could possibly ask for. At this point I'm concerned about how well the 7900-series will turn out given that it's completely unlike any GPU anyone's ever designed before, so drivers and its overall performance are an unknown quantity.

I believe the mass-market launch has slipped to Q1 2012, but we should still get a paper launch by the end of the year, I think. They should have a good few months to optimize and get ready to combat Kepler as well.

I'm holding out for whatever single card Kepler will get me close to 60FPS @ 2560x1600, personally.

e: You knew this was coming, Hitler sees the Bulldozer benchmarks. Downfall is a great movie, and made even more amazing by this scene being so subtitle-ready.

:hitler: "Everyone who bought a Sandy Bridge needs to get the gently caress out now! What the gently caress has AMD even been doing these past few years?"
:geno: Jacking off to hentai and My Little Pony?
:hitler: "I could poo poo a better CPU! 2 billion transistors and this is what we get?"

movax fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Oct 12, 2011

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

movax posted:

e: You knew this was coming, Hitler sees the Bulldozer benchmarks. Downfall is a great movie, and made even more amazing by this scene being so subtitle-ready.

:hitler: "Everyone who bought a Sandy Bridge needs to get the gently caress out now! What the gently caress has AMD even been doing these past few years?"
:geno: Jacking off to hentai and My Little Pony?
:hitler: "I could poo poo a better CPU! 2 billion transistors and this is what we get?"
YES this is exactly what I was waiting for!

Edit: Though I wish it hadn't switched to lame Jew jokes during the last half, and that cheap "Don't cry AMDfag" comment ruined a perfect opportunity for "It's okay, Piledriver will be out next year."

Alereon fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Oct 12, 2011

frumpsnake
Jan 30, 2001

The sad part is, he wasn't always evil.
And it's an overclocking monster too!

http://techreport.com/articles.x/21813/18

quote:

Our starting point was the stock operation of the chip. Our FX-8150 runs at 3.6GHz and 1.2625V by default. When Turbo Core kicks in, the CPU ranges up to 1.4V and 4.2GHz. We figured we'd begin at just 200MHz beyond that top Turbo speed, 4.4GHz, at 1.4V. Seems like an easy first step, right? When we fired off Overdrive's CPU stability test, however, it quickly came back with an error. We had to raise the voltage to 1.425V in order to get the chip to pass just three minutes in that stability test.

...

Yep, 4.4GHz was about it.

...

Worried that we weren't reaching our chip's full potential, we pinged AMD PR on the matter, who pointed us to a section in the reviewer's guide (a document we shamlessly ignore after extracting any useful info) that suggests 4.5GHz is a reasonable expectation for FX-8150 overclocking with an air cooler. We also discovered, at the same time, that AMD had disabled three of the chip's four modules during the Guinness World Record run. That's not something we'd expect, you know, real users who care about performance to do.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Any reviews of the lower-end models?

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

Bob Morales posted:

Any reviews of the lower-end models?
Legion Hardware has some, but the FX-4170 isn't actually launched yet so there's no pricing/availability. It actually does reasonably well thanks to its high base clock speed (4.2Ghz), I think it would definitely be quite competitive with the i3s if it weren't for the fact they have integrated graphics to drive the cost down.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Agreed posted:

I think the whole thing is pretty ridiculous but what kills it completely is the power draw, what the gently caress is up with such an absolutely massive difference in power draw under load compared to Intel?

More transistors, more voltage (power draw increases with the square of voltage). And probably something else going on, because I wrote this whole effortpost based on P=CV2f assuming C (capacitance) was constant given changes in V and f, and while the Intel CPUs in [H]'s overclocked power consumption results jived to a first approximation, the FX used a ton more power overclocked than using that formula would suggest.

Wedesdo
Jun 15, 2001
I FUCKING WASTED 10 HOURS AND $40 TODAY. FUCK YOU FATE AND/OR FORTUNE AND/OR PROBABILITY AND/OR HEISENBURG UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE.

Factory Factory posted:

More transistors, more voltage (power draw increases with the square of voltage). And probably something else going on, because I wrote this whole effortpost based on P=CV2f assuming C (capacitance) was constant given changes in V and f, and while the Intel CPUs in [H]'s overclocked power consumption results jived to a first approximation, the FX used a ton more power overclocked than using that formula would suggest.

I think C would be broadly proportional to transistor count, which makes sense given the power numbers.

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rscott
Dec 10, 2009
Jesus, this is a blunder on the level of Netburst for AMD, and I don't believe they can afford to make a mistake like that. Hopefully the graphics division can keep the company afloat long enough for AMD to either work the kinks out of the process or pull their heads out of their rear end and deliver a product that doesn't have the IPC efficiency of 8 year old parts.

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